I have noticed in casual reading about NLP, that they talk about it being "very scientific" but their magazines are as full of "communicating with angels" and stuff as any occult publication.
I heard it described as "magic for salesmen" and that is borne out by my reading so far on the subject.
NLP is a model of communication and therapy. The whole visual - auditory - kinesthetic learning style thing in education came from it.
The very first NLP book is titled "The structure of magic", which was published before they coined the name NLP, it's presents a core NLP tool called The Meta Model, which is a group of ~12 linguistic patterns that can contribute to people feeling stuck, and useful ways to respond to move past the limitation. For instance, client says "I can't do that" the meta model classic response is "What stops you?".
This came out in 1975 when the stanard therapy response was, "how do you feel about that?" Hence the meta model gave therapists that emb raced it what seemed like a magical ability to have clients rapidly move past internal barriers that most others would get stuck in. Thus seeming magical to the untrained observer comparing to other therapists.
Hence with name of the book began a confusion around whether NLP belonged on occult bookshelves.
The formal definition of NLP is the study of the structure of subjective experience.
So, I find NLP to be a fantastic set of tools that can support magick.
As far as science, the fou ders in their early 20's were goi ng round to psychology conferences belittling psychologists and therapists that weren't using NLP, pissing many of them off, and NLP has not really been given a fair shake academically as a result. There are some very impressive studies around of the results. For instance, there is an allergy cure technique that some allergy specialists in Colorado evaluated and found single session success at immediat allergy remission in 80% of clients when a specific allergen could be identified. Uses a very clever ways of applying Pavlovian conditioning.
I could go on for soon long, but I have other pressing matters at the moment.
